145413-botting-and-cheating-blame-how-we-can-fix-it-ourselves
Content ---- ---- ---- I appreciate the sentiment, but I think you misunderstand who these bots are controlled by. For the most part it's not genuine players trying to take a shortcut or players trying to exploit their way to the top. Yes those players exist, but they are few. The majority of bots are run in a highly organised manner for business purposes in bot farms (computers set up to run bots in online games). They are operated by companies or individuals whose sole goal is to farm currency (and in some cases items to use as currency) in online games. In other words, gold sellers and those selling power-leveling. services. So you're highly unlikely to see guild mate botting. Highly unlikely to even be able to communicate with anyone botting (most bot farms can be run with a nimimum of human involvement / monitoring). The bots don't care if you ignore them (they weren't going to talk to you anyway), report them (by the time support catches up with them they've already laundered their currency), refuse to group with them (they weren't going to group with you anyway). They won't give up and they won't quit the game. Not until people STOP BUYING THEIR GOLD. That's all. In the meantime, we can only hope that Carbine can bring in some measures to curb their impact. | |} ---- ---- ---- Yes in this respect it is on the players, I agree with you. But it's also on Carbine. if you put massive gold sinks into the game (as they have since F2P) then all you are doing is creating demand for the gold sellers and fanning the fire. So if Carbine are having a hard time controlling the bots, they brought some of this on themselves and they share the blame with the players who purchase the gold. | |} ---- ---- Holy crap, Cern. I can't believe this never occurred to me but you are 100% right on this point. At launch, the bots were there because the game was new and all new games have people who will pay to not have to play, so it stood to reason that there would be money for gold-sellers to make. Fast forward a few months, the population bottoms out (ironically with partial credit to rampant botters!) and from then until this last week, we had no bots to speak of for the most part. F2P hits and suddenly there are MASSIVE in-game expenditures that were either not there before (cost of runes) or weren't nearly as bad (dyeing gear). Now even long-time players are looking at gold deficits and thus, gold-sellers stand to make big money. Some big difference in the bots though. Back then, accounts were getting hacked and stolen by the hundreds. Enter the authenticator. Okay, so a lot less of that can happen. But now making an account is as simple as making a fake gmail account, so the gold-sellers don't need to hack accounts, they just need to click "PLAY NOW" and off they go by the dozens. Back then, the bots were mostly mat-farmers. Since Crabine changed it so we have level-locked nodes. Stopped that, so now they're taking the path of least resistance: PVP. Queue up and win or lose, you get some gold, some bags of sellable vendor trash and, with a decent enough name, many can skirt under the radar for days without being called out. | |} ---- Nothing said here will stop players from buying gold. Nothing. People argue that games need gold sinks and I agree, they do, to a degree. The prices that carbine charge for some things, i'm talking game currency not cash shop, is ridiculous. Take Spike/Bulldog hoverboards, one of their flairs is 50 platinum, altogether it costs close to 100 platinum. Then there are prices on the AH. As long as a game has gold sinks it will have people willing to buy gold. Some people are terrible at making gold themselves so take the easy route. I repeat, nothing said here will change that. Gold selling is massive business. | |} ---- ---- Fixt. Notice, I didn't say they were right. Sometimes being thrifty and clever is a bad thing. | |} ---- Agreed, Fixing the pvp bots is more a priority than the ones yelling out in the capital cities selling plat tho. | |} ---- The bots yelling in capital cities are selling the gold that the PVP bots farmed up. Where you think they get the gold from? :lol: | |} ---- ah touché | |} ---- ---- Actually, I know someone who has done that. I had a friend who was a hardcore raider in WoW. Was on a PVP server, played constantly, etc. Me, I was the carebare casual pve guy (and a night elf male), so we never grouped. :) it was a running joke between us. I did Wing Chun and kali, he did Hung Gar and Tai Chi. I was Alliance and he was Hoard. I was PvE and he was PvP. We both loved Mexican food though, so he had some redeemable qualities. :) But we were great friends. We rarely saw him even when we were at HIS house for parties, as he would be in back playing WoW. Eventually he started spending a bit more time with all of us (his real life friends), but still tried to keep up on WoW. Now he had a great job, was moving up, making the bucks, etc. and so his WoW time started to drop. I happened to drop by his house one day as he was picking up a rare item from a seller. I asked what was going on and he admitted to buying items online as it was too much of a time sink to farm for them and do his job, and keep a social life at all, etc. So to his mindset as he explained it to me: "I have money to spare, I am tight on time. I want to be able to keep doing things with my guild and raiding periodically, etc. but with the drop rates the way they are, I was falling behind. THIS way I can keep up on the curve, still have fun with my guild AND have a social life." So that is why some people do it. I have no idea how you actually combat Gold sellers, as if there is a market, *SOMEONE* is going to supply it. | |} ---- ---- I think you misunderstand my question. It wasn't why people do it. That's obvious: It's convenient. LOTS of people have more money than time. But I asked why someone would be stupid enough to give a third party website their CC number. That's virtually ASKING to be ripped off, hacked, or to be the victim of identity theft. It may be appealing to be able to leverage your money instead of your own effort in the game, but the risk is completely and totally not worth it. But it is a valid point: As long as RNG and grind are the name of the game, people will be lured into doing something stupid in order to get ahead, or shortcut, the system. What MMOs need to do is to start rewarding more skillful play, and stop emphasizing time sinks and grind. The great flaw of linear progression is that it places too much focus on advancing your gear instead of advancing your own personal skill or the skills inherent in your character. GW2 does a decent job of this, making equipment relatively cheap, and only cosmetics are expensive. EVE online has another good approach with their non-linear skill and equipment mechanics. But even those game are afflicted with Real Money Trading scams and third-party websites. The problem lies with the players. As long as there are people willing to pay real money to get ahead in a game, there will be a market. But the players also shout the loudest whenever a game becomes 'Pay-to-win', because, quite honestly, it's not fair to see someone jump ahead simply because they can throw money at the game instead of playing. So I think part of it is making a game that people want to enjoy enough that they don't feel that paying for shortcuts is needed. If the game itself is enjoyable to play, then people naturally won't want to skip parts of it. But fun is so damn subjective that I don't know how you'd do that effectively on the scale of an MMO. Especially once you stop to consider how broad the playerbase is, and how many types of gameplay the genre tries to appeal to. I don't think you can treat the disease at this point. You can only attack the symptoms. Squelch the spammers as much as possible. Be vigilant about observing and banning obvious bots in the game. You can't catch them all, but you CAN make it very difficult and annoying to do business. | |} ---- The game supplies it. That was the point of CREDD, at least in theory--to provide an ingame supply source that would outcompete 3rd party RMT and give the profits to Carbine. But in reality, bots can collect gold 24/7 and players can't, so 3rd-party gold sellers were always able to beat the CREDD exchange by a pretty wide margin. So it never did what it was supposed to do and created a number of side issues in the process. That being said, the solution to autosuspend the account is coincidence detection. Lots of real players PvP several matches each day. A few real players generate complaints and get reported several times each day. Very few real players generate no kills, captures, or assists in any of their matches. A few real players do very small amounts of damage, healing, or tanking relative to everyone else. A few real players make heavy use of the email and trade systems to consolidate or transfer large sums of in-game currency. A few real players generate very repetitive keypress patterns in PvP matches. Very few real players have character names like 'asfsaf rasffs'. But the odds that someone who does all of those things is a real player and not a bot is just about zero, and the odds that a bot does all of those things is pretty high. | |} ---- ---- You can get 3V vouchers, which is basically a prepaid virtual creditcard, completely legit, supported by Visa so the risk is reduced to being ripped off. I use it for all online purchases since I don't trust anything online. | |} ---- The problem is that when the game was P2P, that might have caused at least a small dent. But now that it's F2P, they'll just make a new account, and then another, and then another. Yes, they'll be "starting over," but they also aren't new at their business. They've already likely been through that countless times before. They'll start over. Plus, if the Bots are associated with one of the big foreign gold selling companies, they'll be running so many accounts in rotation that even if 200 have to start over, they likely have many more than that still going. Even Blizzard is having a massive issue with Bots, and they have more resources to throw at a problem without even blinking than most other MMO studios. Edited October 27, 2015 by Vanguardian | |} ---- ----